Nation Returns To Death Business

June 11, 2001|By Naftali Bendavid Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The magnitude of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh's crime and the spectacle surrounding his scheduled execution today have obscured a solemn fact: The U.S. government is back in the death business.

Federal authorities had not executed anyone since 1963.

But the next federal execution is scheduled eight days after McVeigh was set to die in the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind.

Many of the 19 others on federal Death Row share only a common fate with McVeigh: All but two are minorities, most are from the South, all are guilty of far less spectacular crimes.

Opponents of capital punishment say their cases raise issues of racial and geographic bias that are absent from McVeigh's extraordinary drama. They fear the hoopla surrounding McVeigh--whose execution even many death penalty foes have had difficulty opposing -- has overwhelmed those deeper questions.

"Timothy McVeigh is just so different from everybody else on Death Row, anywhere in the United States, that he does not fit any mold for people who might be executed," said Sam Gross, a death penalty expert at Columbia University. "He is more like a war criminal than a civilian charged and convicted of murder."

McVeigh was scheduled to be the first person put to death by the U.S. government since the 1963 hanging of Victor Feguer for kidnapping and killing a doctor.

A furious debate has simmered among activists on both sides over the high percentage of minorities and Southerners on the federal Death Row.

Attorney General John Ashcroft tried to blunt that issue last week with a report that found "no evidence of bias against racial or ethnic minorities" in the federal death-penalty system.

But capital-punishment opponents ridiculed that assertion, and the nation will confront the question more directly when Juan Raul Garza faces the death chamber June 19.

Garza was convicted of killing a man and ordering the death of two others in the course of running a marijuana smuggling ring in the early 1990s in Brownsville, Texas.

Unlike McVeigh, Garza is a Hispanic and a Texan, making him a far more typical federal Death Row resident.

"Tim McVeigh inhabits a universe of one," said Greg Wiercioch, Garza's attorney. "If McVeigh is the poster boy for having the federal death penalty, Garza is the poster boy for not having it."

Those fighting Garza's execution say the federal death system is racist on its face.

The Justice Department found last year that 74 percent of those for whom federal prosecutors had sought the death penalty were minorities.

Besides McVeigh, the current federal Death Row includes 14 blacks, three Hispanics and two whites--a proportion similar to that in many states.

"You talk about racial profiling," Wiercioch said. "Determining who should live and who should die based on skin color is the ultimate racial profiling."

Garza had been scheduled to die in December, but President Bill Clinton postponed his execution until this month so the racial disparity issue could be studied further.

Garza is the only federal inmate other than McVeigh with a scheduled execution date, and Ashcroft shows little inclination to postpone that date, saying Garza's guilt is not in doubt.

"Garza claims that he's the victim of ethnic and geographic disparity, even though he's clearly guilty of his crimes," Ashcroft said recently. "There's no reason that I know of to defer his execution."

Supporters of the death penalty strongly dispute the notion that the system is riddled with bias. If large numbers of blacks and Hispanics occupy Death Row, they say, that is because members of those groups commit more crimes.

"We don't say, `More than half the people in prison are men, so we must be prejudiced against men,'" said Dudley Sharp, resource director of Justice For All, a Texas-based victims' rights group.

"Most of the people in prison are men because they commit the overwhelming number of crimes." The same logic applies to minorities, Sharp said.

Although Ashcroft insists there is no evidence of discrimination, he has ordered the Justice Department to continue studying the matter. Activists say the attorney general should halt all U.S. executions, but he has said he sees no need for such a moratorium.